


mahogany

by 2x2verse (agent_florida)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Foursome, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-22
Updated: 2014-08-22
Packaged: 2018-02-14 04:57:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2178786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agent_florida/pseuds/2x2verse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four in your bed, at midnight or at three in the afternoon, a tangle of arms and legs. Sometimes when someone is tired or busy or gone you’ll group off in twos or threes, but when all four of you are at home and willing—those are your favorite times.</p><p>--</p><p>2x2 compliant, not necessarily 2x2 canon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	mahogany

**Author's Note:**

  * For [saffronHeliotrope](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saffronHeliotrope/gifts).
  * Inspired by [from right here the view goes on forever](https://archiveofourown.org/works/842141) by [saffronHeliotrope](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saffronHeliotrope/pseuds/saffronHeliotrope). 



> _maybe if I could see_   
>  _exactly what_   
>  _was in your way, i'd move it for you_   
>  _don't alway need to do it by yourself_
> 
> [ _mahogany_ / snow patrol ]

Four is perfect; four is exactly right.

Four of you together, two by two, two humans and two trolls, two Prospit and two Derse, red and blue, day and night, earth wind fire and water.

Four around a table, four across on the couch. Four controllers to a console, playing another game where the rules are made up and the points don’t matter, racing each other to the finish line, taking down a final boss, building a virtual house together. Four is a perfect little circle, a square knot that doesn’t loosen no matter which end you tug.

Four in your bed, at midnight or at three in the afternoon, a tangle of arms and legs. Sometimes when someone is tired or busy or gone you’ll group off in twos or threes, but when all four of you are at home and willing—those are your favorite times.

\--

You’re the last one to have an exam your junior year of college. Friday afternoon, gorgeous Seattle spring weather, and even though you’re exhausted you feel like you could conquer the world. It’s done. You’re three-quarters of the way done. There’s nothing but a long stretch of sunshine and skinnydipping ahead of you.

The kitchen smells great when you walk into the house you share. It’s nice to come home and know your roommates have been responsible adults while you’ve been out. You drop your bag by the door, stretch and crack at least three vertebrae, and Karkat natters at you from the region of the stove. Dave’s sitting at the kitchen table, set with plates and silverware and even napkins. Sollux emerges from the basement, pecks you on the lips, then helps Karkat dish out the food.

Even when Sollux slurps his noodles and gets sauce all over his face, even when Dave picks out all the mushrooms, even when Karkat talks with his mouth full, it’s the best meal you’ve had in a long time.

\--

After the Crisis, you woke up on your thirteenth birthday with victory and dread competing to overwhelm your system. You won. You got the best ending. And you had no idea what that meant.

The first thing you did was log on to your computer. In the minutes it took for Pesterchum to load, all you could do was pray to yourself, to your god-friends, that everyone was still here. That everyone had made it. That you didn’t have to leave anyone behind.

When the trolls pinged you, when they told you they’d made it through to post-Crisis Earth, it was the most relieved you’d been in your life. And when Dave messaged you, you cried through your smile.

\--

Dave asks you if you’ve showered today and it throws you for a loop. “No, why?”

“I really think you should shower,” he says, kicking your shin under the table.

“Ugh, no,” you groan, and your head lands on your folded forearms. “Someone else do it for me.”

“JB,” Sollux says, running his hand through your hair, “you should probably shower.”

“Fine,” you acquiesce, but you don’t move. “I’ll do it later, just let me chill for a minute.”

This makes Karkat apoplectic. “John Katharine Egbert, you get in that ablution block right now and run the spray on you, or so help me I will take you out into the yard and strip you for the neighbors to see and soak you with the lawnring hose and scrub you myself.”

The outburst leaves a heavy silence in its wake, and it dawns on you what they’re trying to tell you. All of you have long passed the point where you ask one of the others if they want to have sex. For you in particular, it’s hard to say without feeling ridiculous—and if he tells you no, even though he’s perfectly within his rights, it wounds. So instead you’ve taken to telling each other about your hygiene habits.

While you try to figure out what to say to that, Dave runs the inside of his foot along the bruise he just left on your leg. “We’ve all showered today too, just wash your exam stank off you.” He has a point. They’re probably just concerned for your well-being.

Sollux takes the dishes, starts washing them. Karkat cooks. Dave cleans. You do laundry. You all have jobs and it feels good to be helpful. You start stripping, your clothes like bread crumbs leading back to your room. “We’ll be waiting,” Sollux yells to you when you dart to the bathroom with a towel around your waist. Before you close the door, you catch Karkat making a facial expression that was probably trying to be a wink but looks more like a tic.

\--

You and Dave had always had sleepovers, but they changed as you grew up. At fourteen, you would hold hands in the dark, whispering about who-knows-what. Could Spiderman beat The Incredible Hulk. Has Skrillex sold out. Your sixteenth birthday, after you wheeled out a cake that said ‘I’M NOT STRAIGHT!’, Dave had hugged you, and you hugged him back, and somehow both of you forgot to let go even when you settled into your sleeping bags. You had looked forward to college so much because it was going to be like a sleepover every night; you started sleeping in his bed more than in your own, him a semicolon in your left parenthesis.

Sollux and Karkat went to boarding school together, where they learned how to be less alien on a planet totally foreign to them. Karkat didn’t take it well. When he’s stressed, he still sleeps in the recuperacoon in the basement. Sollux told you that the first night the staff took them away and left them only beds to sleep in through the night, Karkat had gone into a total meltdown. When staff wouldn’t deal with it, Sollux took matters into his own hands, holding Karkat down and pailing him until he was soothed enough to sleep. Somehow, they forgot to stop doing that, too.

Dave and Karkat had always feinted around each other, but when college put them in forced proximity, tinder met flame and they tumbled into bed together. They’ve always been contentious, but they’re mirror images, really, red-hot firebrands with a protective streak who are intensely loyal to their friends.

Sollux and Dave don’t speak much around each other. They don’t have to. All they need is body language. Both of them know what futility tastes like, a thousand snarled timelines all leading to the same decisive end. Dave is a ticking time bomb, and Sollux can see the event horizon, and when they come together it’s an apocalypse.

You and Karkat were the friendleaders. You needed people to corral. You needed to feel needed by someone. Your need reached out to his, and the memory of your first time with him can be summed up in the word ‘desperation.’ When he gets overwhelmed, he cries, and when you treat him gently, he weeps. You kissed away his tears and held him until he stopped shaking.

You and Sollux are the bedrock, the bass notes. His energy thrums through you and makes you feel like more than yourself. He’s sweet and slow like honey and you want to savor him for all he’s worth. Your relationship trickled forward into an inevitable crescendo that swept the other two into your orbit and they haven’t left it since.

Buying the house on the edge of campus your sophomore year was an experiment. You pushed three twin beds together in one room, piled on blankets and pillows, and slept in the same messy nest that first night, and you felt like a child on Christmas Eve, too unbearably joyful at the thought of being surrounded by the three people you care about most to even think about missing out on a single moment.

The next morning, all of you woke before the sun and didn’t leave the bed until lunch.

\--

You’re looking forward to a relaxing evening at home, watching some horrible movies with these three goofballs, and you’re barely paying attention when you drip your way from the bathroom back to your room. The corner of your towel is all that covers you, the other end ruffling through your hair.

There are three naked boys waiting for you on your bed and your heart stops.

Karkat says “get over here,” with the threat of a growl under his tone. If there’s anyone whose authority you respect, it’s Karkat. You can taste your own pulse as you walk towards them.

“Drop the towel, stud,” Sollux says, hardly even lisping through it. If there’s anyone whose opinion means something to you, it’s Sollux. Just that hint of praise gives you the self-confidence you need to follow through.

Three sets of hands reach for you. Slip on slick skin. Someone removes your glasses. Someone kisses your throat. Someone pulls you down. Your knees meet the mattress and you fall onto your hands with all three of them there to catch you.

 “We ain’t goin’ anywhere,” Dave reassures you, and starts wrapping something around your eyes. If there’s anyone you trust above anything else in the world, it’s Dave. By the time he knots the blindfold in your hair, you’re already half-hard.

\--

You know all their tells, all their little signs. You know that Karkat will meet you push for shove if you fight him, building up to one moment when he completely shatters, but if you touch him like he’s fragile, he needs you to hold him together while his body wracks him with reward. He always fucks loudly but climaxes silently, the tension seeping from his bones and leaving him trembling and breathless. Afterwards he needs to be dragged back into the solid cocoon of another body to get the warmth back in his bones.

You know that by contrast, Sollux is incredibly sensitive, every place on his body an erogenous zone if you turn the right attention to it. If he concentrates, if you help him, you can control his psionics like he’s a conduit and you’re a lightning rod. He’s never satisfied with one, always two, always dual, but when he’s the most pleased is when he can get one of you to orgasm when he does, alongside him, with him, two of you, together.

You know that Dave keeps himself locked down, self-control and smartass sarcasm like a suit of armor. He hides behind words and uses them to yank on you like puppet strings. You also know that though he’d never say it, having someone else take control can be a blessed relief, and what he sometimes likes best is for you to break his armor all to pieces.

And you? You hold them, you watch them, you keep them, you give them what they need, because they’re yours, and you’re theirs.

\--

“How are you feeling?” Karkat whispers, breath curling around your ear and fingers curling in your hair.

“Green,” you rasp out, mouth dry. “Very green.” Just because ‘Marxism’ has been your collective safeword for two months doesn’t mean you’ve all forgotten stoplight language.

Someone—troll claws prickling in the sensitive place where your glasses curve behind your ears—rewards you with a kiss. Peppered, spicy. Karkat, still. He opens your mouth with the slick of his tongue and plucks at your lips with his own until you’re feverish. And that’s _just Karkat_. There are still two other mouths, four other hands. Someone else is sucking a series of hickies into the muscles of your back, one for each vertebrae. Probably Dave if he’s worshiping your skeleton like that. When a tongue licks along the underside of your cock, it feels electric; when it wraps fully around and tugs from base to tip, you know it’s Sollux.

You have to pull your mouth away from Karkat’s so you can breathe—and then it all comes out of you at once, a rush so heavy it’s nearly painful, when Dave licks—licks again—oh god, you’re shaking, the muscles in your back cording, pulling at the bruises Dave just left. You can feel him everywhere.

All you want to do is fall onto your elbows, hands clasped above your head, and pray for mercy, but Karkat’s hand holds you up, hot under your jaw. “Here’s how this is going to go,” comes the laryngitis-scream at your ear. Sparks run along your skin—they might be literal, you can’t see, but the tiny hairs on your body are standing on end. “We’re all taking you tonight.”

You’re going to spontaneously combust. The noise crawling out of your throat sounds like Karkat punched you in the chest. A sweet sort of ache starts settling into your bones, muscles winding tighter. In moments like this you can hear the commanding tone that lurks under his voice and all you want to do is follow.

Someone—lanky, long—curls into your side. Everything between your legs feels wet and exposed. And then it’s not spittle, it’s lube, it’s not a tongue, it’s a finger. You’ve forgotten how lungs work—you’re out of your element. The rest of them are totally at home, though. Karkat is the pulse rising to the surface of your skin, blood thrumming every place he touches you. Sollux and Dave are in a delicious tug of war, one wanting to race towards the inevitable, the other counseling patience, and it makes your nerves sing as they fight their war over your body.

Fingers rub. One sinks in slow. Curls, claims. “Dave,” comes out quietly.

“I’m here,” he reassures you. Right next to your ear. The one pressed into your side, sucking marks into your skin. But if it’s not him then—Sollux laughs, dry and tight, and that must be why it feels so electrifying. His psionics. Of course. One of his real hands grasps at your hip, claws slipping a little against your skin, and the threat works in perfect counterpoint to the hand in you. Binary, duality.

You’re gripping the sheets so hard your knuckles are grinding together. Hands reach for yours, persuade your fists to uncurl. One human, one troll. Dave’s nails dig into the back of your hand; you’re going to see marks later. You’re probably giving these two perfect idiots bone bruises, but they’ve volunteered to hold onto you while you’re spinning apart into fragments, and you know they love to feel your intensity.

Sollux is so sinfully good at this. He listens to your body with his hands, waiting until you’re greedy for more to finally give you what you want. Nothing hurts. None of it. Everything is smooth, frictionless. Pressure, texture, fullness.

Karkat touches your face and Dave kisses your neck and Sollux fingers you open; your ribs feel like they might fall apart and let your heart spill onto the bed.

\--

Yes, sometimes the four of you have those spontaneous dick fumblings that evolve into puppy piles of naked teenagers trying desperately to touch and be touched. It doesn’t usually work like that, though. There’s at least some forethought, an idea one of you wants to bounce off the others. One of you orchestrates it, acts like a ringleader for this moronic three-ring circus of affection and roiling hormones, but a lot of the time you play it by ear.

Mostly it’s Dave. He loves having that much focus on him all at once, the attention whore. After the first (god, this is so crude) _gangbang_ he didn’t speak for nearly a week, just smiled quietly to himself. He’s gorgeous when he’s serene. The three of you don’t always have the patience to tie him down or anything, but it’s enough for him that the ticking in his head is silent for once.

You’ve only tried to concentrate on Karkat a few times. He called a time-out the first time; it was too much, that he had three people who _wanted_ him that badly, and he shivered under the heat of your bodies as you acclimated him to your nakedness.

Sollux is the same way, wants it equal. If it’s three of you, you always have to be there—red and blue. It’s a thing. You’ve learned to live with his weird fetishes. Four of you, though, is two by two, and everyone enjoys making him spark out of control.

And you—well. There was that one time they tried to wear you out, each of them riding you in turn, and you outlasted all of them. They still tease you about that, your ridiculous stamina, your obscene size, and it makes you more self-conscious than you’d like to admit.

With the blindfold on, you can forget. You can let them do to you. You don’t have to worry about yourself. They’ll take care of you.

\--

The fingers change. One, then none, then one again. Articulated differently. Dave’s voice frames something but you don’t catch the words, just the tone—adoring, adored. Under you, the mattress roils as bodies move around you. Like you’re a planet and they’re satellites.

A cool hand slides up your leg. The front of someone’s thighs brace against the back of yours. Fine-downy hairs—Dave. Even the texture against your skin is too loud right now. He rubs the head of his dick against your hole, blunt tease, reminding you what he feels like.

He doesn’t even have to ask. “Green, green, so much green, _all_ the green,” and two troll mouths reward you with soft kisses pressed to the corners of your mouth.

Long fingers—slim, hot—wrap around your cock. Dave sinks in, slow and methodical. He knows how to take his time with you, knows your tempo. Soft lips with threats of teeth rain kisses down on your necks and shoulders.

Dave’s hips hit yours and he groans. Someone—Karkat? probably—pulls your hair in giddy impatience. “How is he?” Always has to check. If you’re not in control, he’s your acting captain.

Dave just lets out this fluttering moan that comes out of a place high in his throat. You wish you could see his face. The flush under his cheekbones, the raw honesty of his unguarded eyes. How he bites his lip when he can’t find the words for you. “Indescribable,” he chokes out eventually, and now it’s Karkat purring in appreciation.

This is it. This is perfect. You’re floating on nothing, your favorite place to be, and the three people you love most in this world are here with you. Not letting you fall—pushing you further up. You can hear the wet slither of a bulge against someone’s skin. Someone smears his mouth around the place where your blindfold meets your face and you close your eyes on instinct.

Dave is so patient with you. You know this is killing him, because you can feel him pulse in you, but he keeps up that steady pace. His hands are the cool slim ones, sapping the heat from under your skin. One runs up your spine, tracing the marks he left, and lands heavy on your neck. Not to push your head further down into the mattress, but to find any knots, tension lingering. When he finds one, he kneads at it with his thumb the same constant way he moves in you.

You’re melting. You have to be. Your atoms are dissipating into breath. Dave slams into you, jars your frame on the bed, and on instinct you reach out—find two bodies, warm and waiting, and hold on for dear life. You feel feverish, sex-sweat steaming off your skin.

A few uncoordinated thrusts, not like that smooth metronome of timing—rough, stutter, shove and stay. Oh, god. Oh, he’s close, he’s almost there, he’s—he’s not pulling out, he’s going to—he does, breathy vowel sound framed around consonants in the shape of your name.

Your gut tightens but you’re nowhere near, just in this vague haze of ‘yes please very much,’ and you hate yourself for your stupid ungainly freak of nature body that you can’t get there with Dave. He eases out, kisses the small of your back, and falls over in the vague direction of your side. He’s a firecracker. Short fuse, lights up instantly. “Sorry,” you try to say, but it comes out as a slurred mumble.

“Shh,” he tells you, wrapping one of your arms around him and touching your face. He nudges his nose against yours and then claims your mouth, fucking it open with his tongue. “You’re so good, you’re doing so good, I’m so proud of you.”

When he says it like that, so hoarse with need even though he just came, you have no choice but to believe him. You hold him closer, tuck his body under yours, and he puts his mouth every place he can reach, trailing his fingertips through the sweat-slick on your chest.

You’ve lost track of your bodies. If they’re not touching you, you don’t know where they are. Then, suddenly, present again—sear of heat where hips meet yours, a second body under yours cuddled up into Dave. A bulge thrashes in the vicinity of your perineum; it’s so wet you hear it more than feel it. “No,” comes out of your mouth, not as in ‘don’t’ but as in ‘you’re not really going to do this, are you?’

“Yes,” Dave tells you, and keeps eating out your mouth with his own as the troll presses into you.

It’s easier than the first time, but it still feels like so much—more, even, because it’s slick, plating texture, hotter than a human has the biological right to be, a strong set of muscles set for search-and-destroy. You push back into it and a hand finds the small of your back, guiding your movements and thumbing at the place Dave kissed you. “Sol,” you sigh.

“Yeth,” he whispers from somewhere near your hip, and his bulge reaches out to caress your face while his tongue plays with your cock.

So that’s Karkat. It’s confirmed when you hear his distinctive trill from behind you. You’re glad Dave went first, because Karkat’s excitable and he likes to thrash. Better now that he has more breathing room, even though you’re still velvet-tight around him.

Every time the bulge in you undulates, your hips move. Dip down, then back up, in the same slow circles and sine waves being fucked into you. Sollux just opens his mouth and lets you in, careful to keep his lips around his fangs, a hot ring of pressure right around your foreskin. Dave’s hand is still cradling the side of your face, fingertip tracing the rim of your ear, but with the muffled noises coming from him under you he more likely than not has Sollux’s bulge in his mouth.

God, why won’t they let you have your eyes? (Answer: because you would have been done for already, and no one wants that right now.) Your imagination kicks into overdrive, spurred on by Karkat pulling your hair again. Dave’s lips, red wet swollen, swallowing down a curve of gold. Karkat’s eyes, dark and glinting, almost afraid of how good it feels. Sollux’s hand reaching out for Karkat’s to steady him, remind him wordlessly that it’s okay to be obliterated by this.

Karkat’s bulge starts to twist in on itself and you moan, mouth dry—you’re closer, but still not quite there, it’s still somewhere out on the horizon and you can’t reach it even with how hard you try. Then it outright cramps in you, and Karkat yells out the longest, loudest expletive you’ve ever heard as heat kindles in you in a place too deep for words. It’s easier for him to crawl out of you, even more slick this time, and you feel open and wet and exposed and the humiliation you ought to feel has twisted itself into pride, especially when Sollux sucks off of you with a wet pop and starts licking hard between your legs instead.

You’re not sure they’ll keep you up. Dave gets it, holding onto you while you collapse onto him. There’s a sound like soaked leather being rubbed together—Sollux is kissing Karkat, and Karkat chirrs happily before he falls next to you. Dave rolls over under you, strains his head, and then you can hear Karkat inhale, deep greedy hard, before Dave kisses him.

Someone’s fingers are still at you. You’d guess, but you’re too busy trying to _feel_. They’re gentle and merciless all at once—dichotomy, dual. You know exactly who’s working on you. Exactly who’s nudging into you now.

Sollux drapes his entire body over yours, making you into the little spoon. It makes you feel small. You like to feel small—your body looms over most other people’s, and it’s comforting to be held instead of holding. His chin, sharp yielding, hooks over your shoulder. He wraps his arm around your front to frame the base of your throat between his thumb and forefinger, at but not around, feeling for your breath but not stealing it from you. Your bodies are together at every conceivable place, like Sollux wants to melt into you and never leave.

Your hands are frantic. One finds a nubby horn and Karkat shouts, not entirely unpleased. The other slips across Dave’s skin, hunting for something to grip. “Relax,” Karkat says, soft and loose, but it just won’t happen, there’s tension stringing your joints so close together it feels like they’re grinding your bones into powder, winding your muscles so tight it’s a wonder they don’t snap.

There’s a mouth at your nipple. A hand finds the other. A hot tongue swipes its way across odd parts of your body and makes you light up at places you forget you have. The inside of your wrist. The back of your elbow. The socket of your shoulder. You’re close, getting closer, straining for it so hard you’re shaking, but Sollux holds you steady and keeps working at you. Precise. Sloppy. All of it at once.

The curled-up tip of Sollux’s bulge juts right into your joy buzzer and you scream. Dave gets a hand at your mouth to keep you quiet but all that does is slip his fingers inside to stroke your tongue. Behind you, Sollux is crackling in his intensity, sparks literally flying—and then Karkat whispers something against your chest, something in a language you don’t recognize, and Sollux sags against you, done for. He spills where the other two have and you’re claimed.

You are hopelessly in love with the three idiots you’re in bed with, but you’re about to kill them.

From under you, Karkat pushes up, and Dave rolls you over, and you’re on your back, so hard even your heartbeat hurts, every abdominal muscle you have tensed to maximum capacity. You want to reach out, pull one of those two onto you, but your hands can’t quite find them. Instead, one of them plants his hands on your knees and holds you down so you can’t kick. The other takes your arms and won’t let go. “Fuck,” you’re not _whimpering_ , you’re just _in pain_ with how perfect it is, “please just let me die, please kill me already, that’s what you are doing, you are _killing me_ , I am going to _die_ …”

A hand—real, Sollux’s—traces the ridge of your eyebrow. “We’ll let you,” he says, too gentle to be real, “if you want to.”

Because you’ve been tired, so tired, exhausted now that another year of school is over. You thought you could take care of yourself, by yourself. But they’ve been worried about you, and it shows in their hands, their mouths, the lines of their bodies, the way they’ve crashed into you. They want you to let go. If that’s where your fall takes you, they’ll still be there to catch you when you land.

You’re blindsided—literally, the blindfold still firmly around your head—when Sollux vaults across your waist, straddles your hips. He ruts against your cock and you don’t think you’ve ever sobbed with need before but there’s a first time for everything. That’s—that’s his—but usually he hates being fucked there, fingers are fine but nothing more, and he’s still—

Sollux sinks onto you honey trickle-slow, his seedflaps surrounding you, and rocks his hips on the way down.

You can barely move, paralyzed by the pulse coursing through your veins. Sollux reaches for your hands, zips his fingers through yours, and rides you languorous and sweet, always gold. You’re adrift, out of touch with time, bloodrush at the tip of your tongue, sent to meet your doom, and Sollux crashes into you, with you, alongside you, holding you so intimately while his body thrums with yours.

Karkat is holding your hand. He’s on his back next to you, Dave over him—in him, if that loud chitter is any indication. The bed moves in waves, and when you lean over to kiss Karkat, he cries out and throws his head back and spurts genetic fluid onto his own stomach. A stutter-start, a skip in the record, and Dave shudders, silent and serene.

You’re so close, surrounded, buried to the hilt in Sollux, Karkat soft and pliant next to you. Dave reaches for you, kisses at your temple, and whispers, “Come on, baby, let go.”

Three more strokes, and the world tears apart at the seams.

\--

They put the universe—and you—back together again. They always do.

Breath and blood, time and doom; you are unbreakable, you won, you lived. And you are learning to live in this world again: you sleep, and wake, and laugh, and argue, and go grocery shopping, and pick up dry cleaning, and blog, and send each other stupid Reddit posts, and you go on.

This is your reward, four calming heartbeats, four languid bodies, and for them you wouldn’t wish the world unbroken again.


End file.
